Nosocomial Infections and Hand Hygiene Kampf and colleagues (2009) assert that the regular use of hand sanitizers has a better antimicrobial effect than regular hand washing and they suggest that this practice -- in conjunction with improved availability of sanitizers, regular compliance education, reminders, and monitoring -- is best practice for hospital hand hygiene in the prevention of nosocomial infections. This recommendation is based on a review of the literature, which included studies forming the evidence-based foundation for the 2006 World Health Organization (WHO) hand hygiene recommendations, together with more recent recommendations by several authoritative bodies, including: (1) the Commission for Hospital Hygiene and Prevention of Infection, Robert Koch Institute (RKI), (2) the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF), (3) WHO's final recommendation, and (4) the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Kampf, Loffler, & Gastmeier, 2009, p
The gravity of the problem is such that there are no uniform data since there are some infections that patients get from doctors and are not documented due to lack of immediate detection or being mistaken as infection from other areas outside the healthcare facility. However, it is postulated that approximately 220,000 people get victims of the Healthcare associated infection (HCAI) within Canada alone, and out of these 8,000 to 12,000 of them are estimated to end up dying due to the infection (BC Patient Safety & Quality Council, 2013)
Proper hand hygiene techniques require time, a variable that might well be a factor in HAIs in hospitals that ordinarily are understaffed. Moreover, some research has shown marked differences between the hand hygiene practices and effectiveness of medical students and nurses (Bargellini, et al
Healthcare quality research, evaluation, public reporting, and quality improvement initiatives all access these forms of aggregated dataadministrative databases. The convention for structuring and organizing patient information in administrative database includes the following: Patient "gender, age, diagnoses, procedures, length of stay, admission source, discharge status, total charges, primary payer, and hospital identifier" (Farquhar, n
) as a way to make patient outcomes affected by nursing practice salient in the literature and in practice. The literature most frequently seems to associate nursing-sensitive indicators with outcomes that negative -- either less desirable or even adverse (Needleman, et al
Moreover, increasingly reimbursement rates for hospitals are tied to achievement of specific patient care outcomes, a change that has made healthcare quality more important for all stakeholders. Standard technique in hand washing, skin preparation, and wound dressing is core to quality patient care, yet the literature and the media point to an increasingly pervasive degradation in this area (Szilagy, 2013)